LOS ANGELES — The new Gavin MacLeod autobiography recounts childhood poverty and loss, alcohol abuse and a brush with suicide.

Still, the man and the book emerge as determinedly upbeat.

This Is Your Captain Speaking, released yesterday, offers a candid look at his ups and downs in love and in acting, including his unexpected jump in television from second banana ( TheMary Tyler Moore Show) to leading man ( The Love Boat).

He is almost invariably kind to the many TV and film stars with whom he worked through the years — including Cary Grant and Robert Redford — and the parade of previous-generation performers who boarded The Love Boat, including Helen Hayes, Ethel Merman and Cab Calloway.

“The big stars are the best,” he said in a recent interview.

MacLeod, born Allan See in 1931, was raised in Pleasantville, N.Y. His Depression-era childhood included poverty and a household roiled by his father’s bouts of drinking and death of cancer at age 39.

MacLeod was 13, and the loss hit him hard.

“I could have closed up into a ball right there,” he writes. “Could have turned into a ‘bad kid.’ ... But instead, I did the opposite.”

Acting proved to be his passion, which he pursued in school and then in New York, where he had to cover his prematurely balding head with a toupee to get work. He made it to Broadway with a well-regarded performance as a junkie in A Hatful of Rain.

He and then-wife Joan Rootvik, a Radio City Music Hall Rockette, made the jump to Hollywood in the late 1950s, where he found an agent and work — and met actors who turned into lifelong friends, including Ted Knight, another Mary Tyler Moore cast member.

At 82, the longtime spokesman for Carnival Cruise Lines said he considers his Hollywood acting career over and will appear only in Christian-themed projects, such as the 2008 movie The Secrets of Jonathan Sperry.